Friday, January 29, 2016

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Rachel Bryce, Cristina Blanco Iglesias, Ashley Pullman and Anastasia Rogova examine the effect of inequality on education in Canada. And John McMurtry comments on the increasing hoarding of wealth and the lack of anything left over for the rest of us.

- Emily Badger highlights the "million dollar block" phenomenon showing that incarceration is just as systematically concentrated as extreme wealth (if of course in different places).

- Dana Milbank traces the poisoning of Flint back to Rick Snyder's corporatist mindset. And Julia Lurie reports that Snyder was well aware of the dangers of the city's water long before publicly admitting anything - resulting in state employees receiving an alternate source of water while residents were left to ingest lead.

- Mychaylo Prystupa points out that the Libs' changes to pipeline review processes are still avoiding the downstream environmental effects of fossil fuels. And Stephen Rees notes that resource-based economic bets being made with large amounts of public money - including the B.C. Libs' push toward fracked liquid natural gas - are themselves doomed by market forces.

- Finally, Mark Hume reports that Environment Canada had effectively shut down enforcement activities under the direction of the Harper Cons. And Bill Curry reveals that much-trumpeted inspection plans to limit the abuse temporary foreign workers never actually got started.